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March 28, 2024

The Associated Press Tests Out the Viral Web

Important Details: Think of it as detente of sorts. And cast The Associated Press as the peacemaker. With two recent announcements, AP is showing its willingness to get Web users what they want – more easily – and benefit its owner-publishers.

AP’s new Technorati partnership follows in the footsteps of what the Web’s first big blog search engine (20.1 million and counting!) did with the Washington Post and its sister company, Newsweek, last August. It’s a simple enough idea: place a Technorati-powered box adjacent to select news stories on a site. That box contains blogs that refer back to the selected story. So readers of the Post – and now those on the 400+ AP-hosted newspaper, radio, and TV Web sites (largely medium and smaller papers) – can see what others are saying about a story, or who else is pointing to it.

The idea creates a wider discussion around journalism, and more page views. It also gives publishers, editors, and reporters a sense of who is responding out there in the world, and how. "It’s attaching a listening device to every story," says Jim Kennedy, AP’s VP of strategic planning, who put the deal together. In addition to re-circulation of eyeballs, Kennedy says that benefits include new sponsorship and ad opportunities on the blog box itself and on a soft landing page. The service is just starting to roll out; check out an early version here at 1010Wins toward the bottom of the page (placement varies).

The other deal Kennedy put together with Topix seems a bit more arcane, but may have greater significance in the future. Topix is a news search engine, specializing in deeper vertical and geographic sorting. Gannett, Tribune, and Knight Ridder own a majority of the company, which hosts its own popular Web site and licenses its technology to other news companies.

The new AP deal solves a problem for Topix and for Web users. Those of you who regularly use Topix, Google News, or Yahoo! News may notice the frequent reference, "89 related stories" on this topic. Many are AP-fed, many are redundant, and finding the local story on which many of those AP and other wire stories may be based isn’t easy. So Topix and AP have worked out an agreement for AP to provide Topix local feeds – not for publication, but for reference. That should mean that readers seeking the original source of a local story, and the publisher of the story, will both benefit.

If it works well, will AP take the notion to the largest-trafficked search engines? That’s the next logical step, as publishers (who make up the AP board) decide to stray beyond the borders of newspaper-controlled news search engines. In the blogosphere, predictably, the Technorati announcement was met with approval, disdain, and much posturing. Peruse the running debate at social tagger Digg on the announcement and you can get a view you won’t get from mainstream media. 

Or as MarketWatch’s Frank Barnako put it, "Are the elephants learning a dance step, or two?"

In Outsell’s Opinion: These are good steps in a long march. Newspapers must figure out how to get smarter meta-data, including original source, to the engines displaying their stuff for the masses. The Topix deal is one good, smart test and needs to be extended to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (GYM) – at the same time that AP and the newspaper industry work out a better financial deal for exposure of all that content driving GYM ad business. The Technorati deal is also a good one, and points to the need to go beyond detente to a news industry embrace of the blogosphere, connecting in all responsible ways possible, both clearly demarcating the source of all content and finding ways to monetize it.